Symposiasts at Work: Anthony F. Buccini

Andrew Dalby introduces Symposiast Anthony F. Buccini

Anthony Buccini enjoying a glass of Old Rosie scrumpy at the Turf Tavern in Oxford.

Image credit: Anthony Buccini

Anthony first attended the Symposium in 2005. Since then he has not missed a year. Each year he has presented a paper, and each of those eleven papers has duly appeared in the Proceedings. That’s already an enviable record, because the competition to get a paper accepted is ever greater. Add the fact that his first, ‘Western Mediterranean Vegetable Stews and the Integration of Culinary Exotica’, won the Sophie Coe Prize for 2005, and it becomes clear that he must be doing something right …
How did he first arrive at the Oxford Symposium? And why food history? I asked those questions and this was Anthony’s reply:

I grew up in a family whose culinary culture was southern Italian and very loyal to tradition, with a typical southern Italian weekly template of meal types. As with many Italian families, food discourse was part of daily life. At the age of 22, I moved off to Belgium to study Germanic linguistics and there I had a couple of challenges facing me with regard to food: I was quite enthusiastic about exploring Belgian foodways but, as I lived on my own, I had to find a way to recreate in my own tiny apartment the familiar southern Italian diet I had grown up with. In the early 1980s, before Italian food products were to be found everywhere, it required a fair amount of work for me to get many of the things I had grown up with in Belgium. My shopping trips to Brussels’ south side ended up being more and more adventuresome. In short, I did manage to recreate my family’s Italian home-cookery but also became fascinated with Arab foods, Greek cuisine, Belgian cookery, etc. By the time I returned to the States to attend graduate school at Cornell, I was regularly buying cook books and starting to think about ‘cuisine’ from historical and anthropological perspectives.

He noticed that cookbook authors would often offer historical and cultural background revolving around etymologies that seemed absurd to a historical linguist. And so, teaching at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, he set to work on food etymologies ‘as a sort of hobby,’ Anthony explained. ‘When I became aware of the Oxford Symposium in 2004, I decided to try writing an academic piece in the field of food history and that ended up being my 2005 paper.’

That 2005 paper opened up a subject to which he would return – summer vegetable stews, thought of as typically Mediterranean in character, emblematic for local cuisines, such as ratatouille in Provence, cianfotta in Campania, and xamfaina in Catalonia, all featuring vegetables introduced to the region in the late middle ages or from the Americas. These ‘exotic’ ingredients, he showed, were embraced by the lower classes but eschewed by the elite. Names such as Catalan xamfaina/samfaina and Campanian cianfotta were originally jocular names for peasant offal stews … yes, offal! That being the theme of the 2016 symposium, this must be the ideal moment to revisit the topic and take it to a new continent, under the promised title ‘Un vrai jambalaya — “a real mess”: The Complex Western Mediterranean Origins of Louisiana’s Famous Dish’.

Below is a list of Anthony’s published papers in food history. His first book-length work in the field, From Green to Gold: Olive Oil and the History of Mediterranean Foodways is in preparation, to be published by Columbia University Press. But there’s more. He also writes on historical linguistics, especially Western Germanic languages (German, Dutch, English) … with a glance at Pidgin Delaware. Thanks to his studies in Belgium he is a fluent speaker and writer of Dutch (a fairly unusual accomplishment for a non-native) and this, too, will be evident from the bibliography below.

Spaghetti con alici e noci .

Image credit: Anthony Buccini

Spaghetti con alici e noci is for some families in Campania a required part of the Christmas Eve meal, a feast which occurs on a ‘fast day’, that is, a day when one must abstain from all animal products (meat, dairy, eggs). It is a very typical and likely very old pasta preparation which contains no tomato or other American (via Columbian Exchange) elements, though one can use a piquant ‘peperoncino’ to supplement the copious amount of black pepper one normally uses in this dish.Ingredients: spaghetti, olive oil extra virgin, garlic, black pepper, parsley, walnuts, and either (fermented) salted anchovies OR, in place of the anchovies, one can use ‘colatura di alici’, a modern form of garum which is made of the juice exuded by fermenting salted anchovies, produced in the Provincia di Salerno (Amalfi Coast), just south of Naples.